


dream

by mm01



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Gen, M/M, healing.. cuz i said so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 22:17:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18455702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mm01/pseuds/mm01
Summary: He knows this: there was nothing he could have done, nothing he can do, because Gon is stubborn and Gon is selfish; he’d wanted to die alone. Killua is selfish, too: he had wanted—fiercely, wretchedly—to die with him, by his side.He had wanted to be indispensable.or:Killua dreams. Killua begins to work through some things. Alluka helps.





	dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bikeaesthetic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bikeaesthetic/gifts).



> hii i wrote this as a form of damage control. 2014 me was very sad and wanted closure, so this is dedicated to her. it is especially dedicated to my dear dear dear friend cat. Cat: i looooooooooove you. i love you so much! I hope you like it! Sara, i also hope you like it. The fic is about Killua beginning to work some things out wrt his relationship with gon and the weird place they're at with each other. drop me a comment if u want :-)

 

They’re laying side by side in the slanted grey light of the pre-dawn. There’s a sort of ethereal quality to it, Killua feels; hazy. Not quite real. He’s still half-spun in a dream, and morning slides obliquely by in threads.

In his dream, Gon has two hands. This is not unlike reality.

In his dream, Gon has no shoes. The soles of his feet are caked with a dried red clay, and he’s covering his eyes with his palms. “Gon,” he says in the dream, but Gon will not look at him.

 He tries again, louder, “ _Gon,_ ” and still Gon covers his eyes. Flowers sprout from between his fingers, now, from buds and vines that curl along his limbs in fine tendrils; and Killua can tell, without looking, that they come from someplace deep inside of him, someplace unreachable.

Gon is clothed in loose cotton garments. He’s sinking further down beneath the soil, further now, it swallows up his bug-bitten ankles and knees.

Above him the sky is a vast, oppressive blue. It shuts him out, it fills him up; thin sweet atmosphere and useless strips of cloud. Sun beats down on Killua’s scalp. Sun beats down on his shoulders, entreating; sun slips beneath his skin and knits together like muscle and bone. All of this—this breathing, this being—falls flatly into itself, an inarticulable sense of knowing.

 He is cracked wide open. Everything spills straight into him, returning; he is seeing, seeing.

 He watches Gon sink back into the earth.

 The dream’s boundaries grow thick and gelatinous, molasses-slow; they wobble and congeal. Air shifts around him on currents, warm and gusting, and Killua holds the dream on his shoulders. He steadies it. He watches.

 Geese sail at the sun like little paper boats, heading south, towards a storm drain. Geese sail at the sun in a straight bobbing line. They permeate its clear, pulsing membrane. They disappear. The dream-sky hums; it darkens around him.

 He shivers, flexes his fingers. His nails are dull and blunted. The dream-pockets are empty, and hackles raise—needle-straight, warning—on his sweat-slick neck, on the knobs of his spine.

Gon crouches before him, knee-deep in soil, skin stretched grotesquely across a frame that is not quite his own. He breathes, and his joints click. The large shoulder blades heave beneath the flesh. His face curves slightly away, and Killua notes, as if from outside of himself, that he is afraid.

 Afraid of Gon?

 Shadows slash across Gon’s profile like wounds. They press into his eyelids like clammy, prodding fingertips; they darken the jut of his brow. The great creaking shoulders hunch inward, shifting, and watching—always watching—it is a scene Killua knows keenly: this, this memory distorted, this memory inevitable; the wind whipping and roiling around them and lifting the hair, oily and clinging, from his temple, from the nape of his neck.

 Wet black eyes watch him, goad him, and he can’t run from this, he _won’t_. An exit wound throbs between his eyes. The dream twists a road around his neck.

 Here, in this dream, here he is an empty vessel. Here he is filled with light. His mind sits alert in his body like a great white spire, penetrating the sky; a fine clean spindly needle-point. It is sitting on the brink of awareness. It is crouching—poised, ready—at the hard iron edge of knowing.

 He knows this: there was a great and terrible bargain.

 He knows this: there was nothing he could have done, nothing he _can_ do, because Gon is stubborn and Gon is selfish; he’d wanted to die alone. Killua is selfish, too: he had wanted—fiercely, wretchedly—to die with him, by his side.

 He had wanted to be indispensable.  

 There is this moment, now: it quivers before him. It skips and repeats. There is Gon, sunken thigh-deep in a field that is nothing but upturned dirt, his shirt hanging loose from his ruined form in tatters, small again, ragdoll limbs and mud-streaked cheeks and a nervous, wired energy about him, face turned away and hair sloping upward, bristling like wheat stalks in the glare of the sun: full-bodied, naked, stock-still and eerie.

 A light breeze tugs like fingers through his hair, shivery and intrusive. The dream slips like liquid through his fingers.

 He opens his small dry mouth and the name calcifies, bone-white and hollow on his tongue: Gon. Gon Gon Gon Gon Gon. Gon with his tapping foot and tortured squirming, still and brittle, like a scarecrow; Gon with his quick wits and recklessness, straight-backed and hard, considering; Gon, open and earnest, face shuttered and peering away. His gaze slants away from Killua, a hard line beyond the horizon, beyond his line of sight: Killua watches placidly as he hunches into himself, like a body possessed, and inside his stomach churns and roils.

 

There is nothing he can do.

 

It is fear that makes his limbs grow heavy. It is fear that makes his fingers stiff and numb; his knees locked in place; his mind bright with shapes, and shadows, with panic and light and sudden dizzy bursts of color without meaning, color without form. He is high and sweet and swaying and _this is my fault I can’t help him I couldn’t help him_ and

 Gon turns. Gon looks at him. His face is closed, his features set; everything collapses in one short, dizzying second. Thoughtless and dumb he scrabbles at the edge of the dream, ineffectual; it evades him. Gon’s eyes

 Gon’s eyes are wide.

 Gon’s eyes are empty and sad, so sad, and angry, and alone; Gon’s eyes look straight through him and fill up like a helium balloon.

 Killua watches as the delicate vine encircles Gon’s throat, presses up against his pulse point. Killua watches as the vine wraps around his wrists. It binds his arms snugly to his sides. Killua watches.

 Now the vine is made of long black hair. Now it strangles him.

  _Long black hair slipping up into the sky the night pulsing hot and black and oil-slick the hum of a red star bloating between his ruined fingers, his ruined hands—_

 Everything goes eerily flat in the afternoon light.

 White hot sun glare, suffocating blue of the sky. It threatens to swallow up the stillness. The sun pulses and blinks like a hot wet eye. Shadows spit out onto the ground behind trees, behind shrubbery, and he stands at the edge of the clearing, unable to move. He watches as Gon’s mouth opens and closes, silent and awful, like a fish.

 Those eyes trained on nothing. The ground pulling him home.

 Killua is helpless.

 His stomach drops, and he is following its downward trajectory, now, he is falling down to his knees, his forehead bowing low to the dirt; he is shaking and hitching on the exhale, quivering, he is sucking in just enough air to bawl— _catharsis_ , he thinks savagely, _release_ —when the dream tumbles and shifts around him.

 Something in his heart ruptures and spills, warm and leaky, into the cavity of his chest. He coughs up a seed and spits it into his palm. It writhes in his fingers like something living, and he thinks, suddenly, _Nanika_ ; hair-beads and white hands and small drooping eyes, small drooping mouth, the sweet chubby girl-fingers tugging at his sleeve, at his hand, “ _Killua_.”

 (And power, her power, immense and unfathomable—this, too, like an afterthought.)  

 He thinks _Alluka,_ he thinks of his sister. Shame wars with relief wars with gratitude. He takes a step forward. He sucks air straight into his lungs, raw and pure and painful, yells

 

“Gon!”

 

 And he is sharp, fearful, choking. The name spills out of his mouth like a prayer, hoarse and shaking, reverent; the sound cracks into clarity.

 The dream goes rigid. It falls away in fragments.

 

Killua opens his eyes.

 

Mouth dry throat tight. Above him the eggshell ceiling, hairline cracks and chipping paint and clean white light and pressed linen sheets, stiffly starched; motel comforter thick and pink and polyester—

 He swallows three times. He lies perfectly still; breathing, breathing.

Keep breathing. This is collecting yourself, this is business as usual.

 This is noting that beside you the bed is empty.

 Sheets are kicked haphazardly to the foot of the mattress. A comforter lays abandoned in a tangled heap on the carpet.

 Gon, Gon. He thinks of those eyes and he aches.

 Killua peels the shirt off his back and tosses it at the tv, boxy and heavy before him; it slides wetly down the screen and falls to the floor. He is warm, and shaking, near-feverish with dream, and the hard straight lines of the room waver before his eyes. They crawl—deft-legged, jerky, living—like insects in his peripherals.

 

Gon.

 

Killua flings his arms to either side of him, quivering, and clammy hands hit air. They dangle, loose and empty, over the side of the bed. He kicks off one sock and throws it at the door frame, stricken all at once by the abject uselessness of the gesture: he doesn’t _feel_ any better, and there goes his sock on the carpet, dusty and thick with tracked-in dirt and upturned ashtray grime.

 He doesn’t feel better at all.

 And, he realizes, it is Gon’s sock: a hole at the ankle has been neatly mended, and Killua’s only ever sewn up his own skin.

 How to mend this, how.

It isn’t urgent, necessarily—Gon is half a world away from him now, at home—but the press of it (the press of Gon’s absence, the chasm of language and not-language) sits damp and heavy on his chest like laundry, washed and rewashed and never hung out in the sun. The dream-Gon in his head sits quietly, collects mildew and mold spores and rot.

 Killua pulls off the other sock and flings it at the window. Light spills, unhindered, into the bedroom.

 They email and they text. They send postcards and letters on white-lined stationary, letters about nothing; updates on travels and life and homework and studies and nothing, really, nothing in particular, everything neat and contained and easy and—empty. Words on lines on paper.

 

They are letters from no one.

 

He dreads their arrival as fiercely as he anticipates it, the very event of it, slanting empty words in Gon’s careful, practiced scrawl.

 

Letters like

 

_Dear killua i am well i am trying for my nen but well still nothing, hope you are well hope alluka is well mito says hello granny says hello. I am writing from the top of the tree on whale island and i am in a bit of hurry as the sun is sinking on the ocean i can see it where i am and mito will scold me if i’m late to supper again. but killua it’s hard to be on time it is hard on account that she makes me do algebra over supper and im really no good at it no good at school so excuse my penmanship and excuse my being in a rush and write me back if you want to_

 

_gon freeccs_

 

Letters like

 

_Dear Gon,_

 

_You have more to work on than your penmanship. Your grammar is awful. Atrocious. Embarrassing. Alluka is well and Nanika is well and I’m attaching a picture of the city we’re in, you would like it, it’s very warm and not too crowded and there’s always something cool to look at._

_The street vendors sell meat kabobs with roasted tomatoes and chicken and vegetables and for breakfast Alluka had nine and i had thirteen and she’s having a growth spurt, she loves the dress Mito sent but now it barely reaches her knees. Will contact you with our next address we’re moving on again soon. Nanika says hi and lastly don’t give your old lady a hard time about the math Gon jeez you are too stubborn._

 

_Killua_

 

They do not speak of specifics: mail can be intercepted. Phone lines can be tapped. _It is for Alluka’s safety that we don’t talk, not for real at least,_ he thinks, but the thought rings false in his head, accusing. He expels it from his nose in a drawn out sigh.

 He cannot lie to himself, not about this. Not about Gon.

 He scrubs one arm across closed eyes. _Wouldn’t it be nice_ , he thinks idly, _if words were not so absolutely useless?_ So out of reach?

 And where, exactly, should he look for the words; where should he find them?

  _He will find the words, he will; he will find the words to speak to Gon and then they’ll talk for real, about—what they need to talk about. It will be done purged over. It will be gone gone gone and they will go back to normal, how it was, so easy to be them so easy to slip back into being one boy one body, the animal of Gon and Killua, only—_

 This is where his head begins to pound. His thoughts go viscous, blob uselessly together; thick, gluey, untranslatable. He doesn’t know how he feels, what he wants. He doesn’t know what he wants from Gon.

 (What _does_ he want, what does he feel?)

 There is love—always love, always, and admiration and affection and yearning, still yearning—but pain, too. Hurt. _Why didn’t you need me_. Soft like rotting mango flesh his body gives way to the hard little pearl at his core, and it is a nameless thing, lonely and small. It rejects understanding.

 It is dull sweet ache, it is.

 There is guilt and regret and a tangle of bad feelings, wrong feelings, all too heavy to parse or touch so he strews them across his mind like a battlefield: here the body bleeding, loose-limbed and face-down on sandy turf. Here the weeping child. Here the shrubbery, blank and unassuming; here the body broken, long hair loose and tangled behind it; and he lifts it, the body, he cradles it, black hair dragging in the dirt as he carries it

he carries Gon.

 He can’t put him down.

 

(How to put him down, now? How?

 

Really. He wants to know.)

 

They spoke on the phone—only once—and the silence was raw. He’d wanted to pick at it, like a scab, but there was nothing to hold onto, nothing to touch. His fingers were loose at his sides. His hands were bereft.

 Gon was light and somewhat jovial, he remembers, his voice beaming straight into his ear as if present, as if tangible, “ _Ah, Killua?_ ”

 “Gon! Can you hear me?”

 Yes, he could. They spoke about dirt.

 Whale Island dirt. It was the rainy season, warm and muddy, and Gon—mournful, self-pitying—tracked it in and out of the kitchen, staining the hardwood floors of the front hallway. “Miss Mito’s eyes were scary, scary!” he said, hushed voice pitching higher. “Narrowed into slits! Like a snake, Killua! But I keep forgetting to take my shoes off, like a little kid.”

 And then, forlorn: “I’m making so much trouble for her.”

 “You’re too used to having me around to keep you in line,” Killua scolded, lifting his fist up in threat, shaking it, but oh—stupid. That was stupid.

 Gon was not here; Gon could not see him.

 

Obviously.

 

He yanked his hand down into his lap, strangely embarrassed, and looked sharply downward. Hair spilled over his eyes, over the bridge of his nose, settling—ticklish, obscuring—on the rounded peaks of his cheekbones. He watched the room through a shroud of whiteness. He watched the dull gleam of streetlights out his window. It was a blurred, oily, smearing light, warping the blue air around it, holding it—suspended, contained—as if in unsteady orbit.

 A precarious system. Gnats swarming like milky star clusters.

 It hung gently in balance: the bulb hummed at the center like a star, particles rushing around it; debris; dust motes and space junk and fragile moth-wing comet tails.

 It was dusk now, the sky growing heavy, the orange disk of sun slipping low into a place beneath the sky. Streetlights flicked on one by one like oil lamps. Streetlights flicked on one by one like revelations. Light slanted out of his head, slipping out through the ear.

 He watched them, little universes, little burning microcosms of life, small so small and a voice blurring soft in his ear like the lonely streetlight hum, hand cradling the receiver staring just staring and all of it so dim, so muted, the falling darkness seeping out from the corners of his head—

 His tongue thickened in his throat. He swallowed, hard, slowly folding his knees up into his chest. Gon’s voice had cut off into expectant silence, and he cleared his throat now, hesitant. “Killua? Are you there?”

 This was in a motel room, maybe a month ago.

 This was in the bedroom, which was small, and which he shared, easily, with Alluka—everything was easy with Alluka. He sat on the rough nylon carpet, a crick in his lower back, leaning back against the wall with the phone cradled soft in his sweaty left hand.

 Her suitcase was open beside him, spilling clothing onto the floor, and she had already come twice into the room with worried eyes, kneeling over the suitcase as if searching for some coveted item.

 “My bracelet,” she murmured, gaze slanted off to the side. She kept her face down, her shoulders stiff with worry and ill-contained interest, and this, too, was easy: she had no practice lying to him, and wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her hands were distraught, rooting through neat folds without aim.

 He had, at one point, covered the receiver with his palm: “Alluka,” he said, eyes pleading. “You left it in the kitchen. It’s on the windowsill.”

 And she’d left him alone.

 On the other end of the line, Gon was quiet. “Maybe,” he had conceded. (He seemed reticent, more reserved, now, and was he okay? Could Killua ask, would that be overstepping?)

 He opened his mouth. He tried to form the syllables, the words. He tried and instead he laughed, strangled, off-pitch, “it sounds like you’re doing fine, Gon. You only need time to settle in. Good.” He tripped awfully on the last word, breaking off into silence.

 (No, no, he’d decided. Not his place anymore, not his place.)

 He strained for something else to say. He had already regaled Gon with tales of travel, tales of Alluka and Nanika and Leorio—whom they’d visited, briefly—and

 

What else, what else.

 

Silence. The sound of Gon breathing, even and steady. More silence. With Gon, really, was there nothing left to say? Truly?

 “So.” Distant. Gon’s voice was tinny and small.

 “So.” Lump in his throat.

 “I won’t hold Killua.”

 “No, don’t be stupid. Gon.” Those eyes, those eyes. The weight of the body in his arms, a phantom weight, phantom arms slung loose around his neck, slipping, heavy empty weight and breathing? _was he breathing?_ And still, _still_ how to put him down—

 Centralized headache.

 He closed his eyes and saw the afterimage, clear and bright, of Gon looking at him, his frenzied animal terror, his despair, and then flatness the flatness. All of it swallowed up and filed away and what could he do? Nothing, nothing, and what would he do, what would he be if he could not help?

 

Nothing.

 

“Killua?”

 His heart shuttered violently, painfully. “Gon.”

 “I didn’t know if Killua was still there. Listen, I—” Gon blanched, petered off.

 Silence for a beat, for a minute. Hands empty too empty; a sudden deja vu. _Those eyes those eyes_. The image gathered tight in his head, blurring into a hot, throbbing ache; it burrowed behind his eyelids and settled into itself to watch him, like an animal.

 “Ah—nevermind.” Gon said abruptly. “Sorry to bother you. We’ll talk again?”

 “Yeah, Gon—wait.” He swallowed, disbelieving. “It’s barely been fifteen minutes.”

 “Mito needs my help taking down the futons. It’s still morning here, you know. It was nice to hear your voice, Killua.” And he was perfunctory, so unlike himself that Killua froze, stuttered.

 “Yeah. You too, I mean.”

 They sat for another minute, the line stretching long and empty between them, Killua folding stiffly into himself and Gon most likely in his kitchen, curled around the plastic white handset while Mito clattered about behind him, up to her elbows in dishwater, he could imagine it now: Mito, feet planted in a battle stance, blouse sleeves neatly rolled and frothy water spilling up onto her apron, the room still and bright, off-pitch tune and salty air and fronds of maidenhair spilling out of pots packed with soil. Yes: all of this and Gon, too, with his tucked-in shirts and knocking knees and feet bare and dirty, far away, far away from Killua.

He felt wistful. He felt lonely. He felt wrong to be lonely, and angry, angry at himself and at Gon and at everyone, everything; telephone static and dial tone and who hung up first he doesn’t know; he was dazed, dazed.

 

_You too._

 

It has been three months since they parted.

 Maybe it isn’t fair to be angry but he is. It isn’t fair to be relieved but he is. He is hurt, too, and confused; at night he stares at the ceiling (often a different ceiling; often a different city) and he shakes. His hands shake. His head throbs.

 He remembers, painfully, how the moonlight had laid itself out against Gon’s features, overlapping blocks of shadow and light. There was color, formless, drifting over the bow of his lip like a cloud over water; like a storm over sea, rolling in, fading out, salt-tinged wind and empty battered shoreline and flat orange disk beaming straight through the clouds.

 He thinks of the dance and the gleam of sea glass and stone: hard to look at. Bright too bright. He thinks of the smooth planes of Gon’s face; the mole beneath his right eye. Straight black lashes and a short blunt nose. Teeth cut straight like wave-rocked shells.

 Island boy, island boy, home where he belongs?

 He misses Gon, misses him fiercely, all of this and the simple fact of loving him. It is bittersweet: he loved him. He loves him still. But—always a but—there is a moment that sticks, that moment with Pitou, with Gon standing big and hulking and ugly before him, grotesque and inhuman and crying, softly, like a child.

 Like a child. 

There is a memory. Bright and electric it sits behind his eyelids, running over itself like a tape, now old now new; now skipping in places; now fuzzy and ill and wrong wrong wrong,

always wrong.

 Those hands, those arms. That thick-trunked torso. Those shoulders, those thighs; the rounded swell of calf; chest and neck and black-soled foot. That hair reaching skyward, awful, awful.

 Those eyes those eyes.

 

 _His_ eyes?

 

This is something he cannot sit and think about for very long. He taps his fingers along his pulse point, breathing in, breathing out.

The dreams are always very real.

 He takes a moment to reorient, curling his knees into his chest and breathing, breathing, still floating somewhere outside of himself. This is the third dream of Gon this month, and he’s getting better at shrugging off his hurt. He’s getting better at compartmentalizing it.  

 There was life with Gon; there is life with Alluka.

 He catalogues the changes compulsively, drawing parallels like lines in the sand: Alluka sleeps like the dead, for one. She kicks and drools and has nightmares. She sleeps and she sleeps then she slips light-footed from his side, padding into the kitchen where she sits, pensive, by the window; her hand on her chin, her knuckle in her mouth.

 Gon had always slept light. His eyes twitched and shuttered beneath his eyelids, jerky and rapid; his fingers quivered and gripped for sheets that often were not there: they slept in tree-tops, in sappy beds of pine needles, in crabgrass and sand dunes and slick, dewy underbrush, and sometimes—in summer, the year he turned thirteen—there would be lightning storms, rainless and humid, the full moon yellow like an egg yolk and night settling over them like a film.

 Yes: the air came in great warm gales, grass tickling his arms, and he’d wake up flat on his back to the pines shifting darkly above him and Gon by his side, eyes bright and strange, lips in the shape of an _o;_ wonder, wonder. Dry thunder rolled in the distance: the sound was low and trembling. It took root in his body, expanding like a damp sponge, filling the cavity of his chest until his lungs were somehow insufficient, too tight, and slowly, slowly, taking shallow breaths, he’d move his hand—a foreign appendage, awkward and bumbling; with a mind of its own—from the divot in the earth where it lay, fingers loosening to knock against Gon’s wrist, and Gon’s hand would slip clumsily into his.

 They’d watch the sky flicker, white and lit-up from below. They’d watch the great dome shutter and flash like an old-timey camera, lighting up the bellies of the thick, opaque clouds gathered wooly and dark above them. He’d run his thumb over Gon’s dry hand, wide and unyielding in his own.

 It was simple, then; easy.

 Killua shakes. He shakes and the memory dislodges itself, falling from his skull like thick, clumping brain matter. He heaves himself out of bed and walks into the kitchen.

 He finds his sister standing barefoot by the cabinets, the electric kettle humming and rattling on its plate. Her hands flit about hummingbird-quick; she takes a half-empty bottle of honey out of the fridge and smacks it on the lip of the counter. Once, twice, three times: he listens to the dull thunk of plastic on soapstone; a full, rounded sound. “Brother,” says Alluka, a smile in her voice. She doesn’t turn around. “Did I wake you?”

 He doesn't trust himself to reply. He watches the honey pour slowly out of the nozzle, thick and ancient, like amber. It glistens and dribbles. His throat tightens.

 The frayed edges of Alluka’s nightgown skirt the floor as she turns to him. She looks him up and down, eyebrows knitting together. And then, stepping towards him: “Are you alright?”

He’s worried her.

She’s stubborn, _god_ is she stubborn, but he can still salvage this, he thinks; he smooths down his hair and tries for a smile. “Hey, of course I am.” He's careful not to sound too bright, too forced—she's perceptive by nature—and it works: his tone comes out even, if not a bit monotonous; he takes solace in the whole, steady syllables. Her eyes flicker away for a moment, not quite reassured, and he flounders for a follow-up.

 A beat of silence. Clocking ticking silently. Irrationally, sweat beading on his nape, he thinks: this is his sister, his _little_ sister, but he's measuring out his words and he can barely respond; he’s pathetic, pathetic.

 “Should I make eggs?” He says finally, lamely. His voice pitches low, too raw and too grating, and her eyes narrow into little slits.

 He digs his fingernails into his palm, _stupid,_ he could have shot for middle ground— _I was up playing games,_ or _something, an excuse—_ but it's late, too late, he was evasive, and Alluka leans stolidly back against the counter.

  _Should I make eggs._ He curses himself: _idiot, dumbass_ , and it’s Gon’s voice. The words thunk gently in his head like the rap of knuckles on his skull, light, teasing. He feels mixed up; time slips like sand through his fingers. He feels weirdly patronized; seen through. His cheeks burn.

  _You can't hide from the people who love you, Killua,_ says Gon’s voice, bright and chiding. A breeze comes through the window, damp and heady with the clinging scent of wildflowers. It drags lightly through his hair, like fingers, wet and brackish and thick; a salty smell, like the sea. They're a few miles from the coast, in an inn in a village by the ocean; Alluka had wanted to see the beach. They’ll get there today, it’s a bus ride away, but the shore makes him dizzy with memories. It’s all somehow redolent of whale island, and his head grows thick and mucous. Dreams and memories thread into the present.  

 She turns abruptly back to the kettle and pours two cups of tea, shoulders tensing. “You said you would stop that,” she says.

 “Stop what?”

 He swallows, feeling lost, drifting. His body is a thing untethered, his hand still suspended in air. Gon’s voice floats around him like radio static, like the slip of one station into the next, _Killua, hey Killua,_ and the morning moves rhythmically around him. He’s conscious of the pound in his skull and a swaying beneath him, like they’re on a boat.

 It is too far early for this thread of argument.

 “You just—” She presses the heel of her palm into her eye, frustrated. “You said you would stop treating me like a kid. I _know_ you dummy, I can tell when something’s wrong. You don’t have to change the subject.”

 “That’s not what I’m doing, Alluka, really. I promise,” he says, still half-present. His eyes rove over her shoulder, searching. The door is slightly ajar, quivering on its hinges; she’s already been outside.

 The morning is warm and breezy. She’ll want to train after breakfast, he knows, and she's talking to him again, he needs to force himself back into his body. But dream-Gon’s voice is reverberating, knocking circles around his skull. In the morning light it seems like he is here, vividly present, seconds from walking through the door: would he kick off his boots—as he always did, lining them neatly by the door—and walk in?

 Gon had told Killua, only weeks ago, that he kept tracking mud into the house, mud on Mito’s floors, and was he lost, too? Was Gon as disoriented as Killua?

 Sometimes he feels unbalanced, uncentered.

 It’s more than just the dreams. Gon spills into every facet of his day, every interaction. He is there and not-there. He is a silent, undetectable force, light and its opposite; the heavy slant of the sun and the tense force that buoys it, filling up the vacuum.

 Dark matter boy: there is no accounting for the pull of his gravity.

 Gon sits at the center of his center. He holds it in place. When he cracks, it cracks, and the universe goes hurdling. Killua doesn't want to live in his orbit anymore, no: he wants to stand beside him.

 His mind catches on the thought even then, talking to Alluka, caught like a thread on a thorn, one step and it all unravels.

 He thinks of _Gon walking easily through the door, kicking off his boots, dropping his bag on the floor and stretching his arms over his head. Whining—because he could be irritating, and obnoxious, and there is truth in this reconstruction—he’d say “Killua, my back huuuurts, can you crack it for me?”_

  _And then Killua, slipping into his familiar role, “Stop over-training and you won’t need me to.”_

  _He’d frame it like a chore when in fact he liked being needed; he reveled in it. He would smirk then, voice superior, “you should know your limits by now, you aren’t some stupid kid.”_

 He liked the feeling of being a part of something bigger than himself. He liked to subsume himself in it, all the nasty parts erased, all the bad memories and hatreds and old hurts discarded in the easiness of being them, Gon-and-Killua, Killua-and-Gon. It was simpler, even enjoyable; it gave him purpose.

 

Maybe they were both single-minded in the end.

 

_He would tease and Gon would peel off his socks for better traction, planting his feet in a play-fight stance, dimples shining through the dirt, and Killua would turn away, on purpose, showing his back, an invitation: “jeez, Gon, you—”_

  _And then Gon would pounce._

 

“Brother!”

 

Alluka’s voice is insistent, exasperated, and she flicks him in the forehead. She’s trying for annoyed but her face is about to crumble, and he swallows again.

 “I’m sorry.” He finds himself unable to elaborate, but he means it. He infuses his words with his sorrow, hoping she'll hear it: he can't always be what she needs him to be, he sorely regrets this; and to his surprise she grabs him by the cheek.

 “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to let me help you,” she says firmly, pinching him. “Listen to me. You act all weird and guilty when I bring him up, like you did something wrong, but it _wasn’t_ your fault.”

 “Alluka—”

 “Shut up,” she says, and it’s loving. He lets himself lean into her. “I was going to ignore it, but you’ve been saying his name in your sleep again. And we’re finally going to talk about him. Sit.”

 Her tone is brisk and commanding, and he squints at her. “When did you get so bossy?” 

“When I realized I was allowed to be.” She smiles brightly, only half-false, setting her elbows on the table. “Sugar?”

 “Two. Thanks,” he says warily. He sort of has the feeling that he's in over his head now. She takes his hands in hers and inhales.

 “No use talking around it,” she says, almost to herself. Her eyes snap abruptly towards him. “He was hurt. Really bad.” She swallows. “Nanika showed me, he was—I haven’t seen a lot of the world but I’ve never seen anyone like that, so close to dying and just. There.”

 “You don't have to—”

 “I want to, stop talking. I was _there._ It was Nanika helping him, but I was there, too, I always am, and you're gonna listen to me.” She narrows her eyes, index finger pressing accusingly into his chest. “I felt him. And no one else did that to him, _no one._ It was all his own energy swirling around in there, nothing from you.”

 That kind of stings, actually. _“_ It isn't that simple.”

 She groans, rolling her eyes. “You aren’t _listening_ to me. Saving a life isn’t like granting a normal wish, you know. We had to actually get inside his heart and his head and feel stuff, like what he felt. Nanika had to absorb him entirely and build him back up again. Don’t look at me like that, all sad.” She gives him a light shove, then, and he bounces back like a toy punching bag.

 “It’s hard work but it’s what she likes best.” She says, decisive. “She knows him as well as you do, and she loves him because he loves you. I only get the bits and pieces, of course. But I do know that he’s a lot like you, even if you try and act distant.”

 It's a lot to take in at once. “Gon,” he says, jaw working, “is not like me at all. For one thing” —he drops an apologetic hand on her forehead— “he's much more open than I am. But I'm trying.”

 It's a half-assed excuse, and it sounds weak even to his ears, but she allows it.

 “You're both dumb,” she says cheerfully. “I’m more perceptive than you think, big brother, it's no use pretending. Like—you don't tell me things because you think that it's a burden, right?”

 “ _Alluka,”_ he pleads. She bulls onward, taking one of his hands in her own again.

 “Didn't Gon feel the same way, in the palace?”

  _The palace._ The words come easily from her mouth, and he startles. Her tone is light, considering, but she’s watching him intently. “Were you glad that he left you out? Were you grateful to him? He didn't want to burden you, either.”

  _They would wrestle, then, tousling on the floor, rolling and shoving and kicking, a knee to his throat—Gon,_ ow!— _a palm in his face, “get your gross sticky hands away from my face—ow—or I swear I'll bite your finger off, Gon you_ dumbass— _”_

 

He rubs one hand across his eyes, voice breaking. “I wanted to die for him.”

 

Alluka squeezes his hand tightly, wiping away his tears with her sleeve. “You’ll have to forgive him for not letting you,” she says softly. They sit for a moment, until he can look up at her. She looks him straight in the eyes, then, searching. “I for one,” she says, “am glad he kept you in the dark. _I_ get to keep you with me for awhile. But I'm _not_ gonna let you do the same thing to me. Okay?”

 “You get to _keep me?”_ he splutters. It's almost funny; his voice rises with hilarity. “What am I, a _dress_?”

 She slaps her palm on the table, hard, and tea jumps out of the mug. “I _said_ don’t change the subject! Say okay!”

 “Okay, fine, fine! Jeez!”

 “Again! Like you mean it!” She shouts.

 “Okay, Alluka, I get it, I’ll talk to you! I won't change the subject!” He's smiling in spite of himself, and he looks away, out the window, where winterberry holly and scraggly evergreens sprout from sandy soil, pitching from the ground with old, gnarled roots and prickly brambles, wild grass and shrubbery and black-eyed susans facing the sun. He hears dogs barking in the distance: a mournful sound.

 “Tell Nanika, too.”

 “Don’t bring her into—”

 “Killua?”

 He heaves a sigh of long-suffering, chest filling with warmth. “Fine. She doesn’t even know what we’re talking about but fine! _Okay_ , Nanika, I'll do what she says!”

 Cold white hands make a grab for his sleeve. “‘Kay.”

 Alluka slips back out, grinning tentatively, and he tightens his grip on her hand. “I’m sorry. Really,” he says, earnestly. “Really. I know this isn’t easy for you either, that I don’t have things figured out.”

 Sun filters in through the window, warm and orange as it rises. Hair, tangled with sleep, tumbles gently over Alluka’s shoulders. “Dummy.” She says, poking out her tongue. “You don’t _have_ to have things figured out. Just travel around with me and Nanika, and everything will come together. Okay?”

 “Okay.”

 He is home, he is home. Something at his center ruptures and bursts.

 She eclipses the sun, stands in front of it, and still bleary-eyed he watches her, his sister bathed in light. Twin sunbeams split around her, envelop her, and the light is warm and consoling. It pools beneath his skin. It spreads into his fingertips. He is dizzy with wonder, with possibility, and he watches the light dapple and glow.

 It spills around them like water, almost liquid in consistency. It blurs their silhouettes into something unknowable.

 

**Author's Note:**

> i am strawberryblondhourz on tumblr! I was inspired by anne sexton, donna tartt, and margaret atwood (a little bit). thanks for reading if you got this far! I didn't add this to my other collection because it is a prequel of sorts, but if you're interested i have a post-reunion fic too.


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